Jeff Bridges knows firsthand what it means to persevere.
During Wednesday’s Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour, the 74-year-old actor opened up about filming the first season of FX’s “The Old Man” with a massive tumor inside his body.
“I’m feeling great now,” Bridges said during a panel, per Entertainment Weekly. “What is so bizarre, to me anyway, in the first season when I was doing these fight scenes, I had a 9-inch by 12-inch tumor in my body, in my stomach, that didn’t hurt at all. So that’s surprising to me.”
JEFF BRIDGES TALKS ‘THE BIG LEBOWSKI’ AND HIS TERRIFYING NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE
Bridges was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2020, while on a COVID-19 pandemic mandated break from filming the thriller.
He first noticed something wasn’t quite right during one of his routine workouts.
“I was doing some exercises while on the ground and felt what seemed like a bone in my stomach. I thought to myself, ‘Hmm.’ But it didn’t hurt or anything. I asked [wife] Sue what she thought. She said: ‘I don’t know, but you’ve got to get it checked out.'” he said during an interview with AARP magazine in 2023.
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“I’m hiking and feeling great,” he continued. “My shins really itch, and I think, ‘Oh, I just got, you know, dry skin.’ Then I had night sweats, but thought, ‘That’s just hot summer nights.’ It turns out those are lymphoma symptoms.”
Bridges eventually went back to filming, not knowing he had a tumor in his stomach.
“You’d think that would have hurt or something, when they were punching me and stuff,” he told the publication. “It didn’t.”
After completing his final round of chemotherapy, Bridges came down with COVID-19.
“Shortly after finding out that good news, I got a letter from the treatment center where I was getting my chemo, and they told me that there was a possibility that I had been exposed to COVID,” Bridges told Fox News Digital at the time. “That meant me being in the hospital for five weeks, very close to, you know, kicking the bucket. I mean, I was very sick.”
He told People magazine in 2022 that the ordeal left him “pretty close to dying.”
In April, the actor explained being near-death was a “learning experience,” in an interview with Page Six at the 49th Chaplin Award Gala at Lincoln Center.
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“It’s amazing the way the mind can forget all that stuff,” Bridges added. “I don’t think too much about the past.”
Fox News Digital’s Lauryn Overhultz contributed to this report.
